Drought is one of the major threats to societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, as the majority of the population highly depends on rain-fed subsistence agriculture and traditional water supply systems. Hot-spot areas of potential drought impact need to be identified to reduce risk and adapt a growing population to a changing environment. This paper presents the Blended Drought Index (BDI), an integrated tool for estimating the impact of drought as a climate-induced hazard in the semi-arid Cuvelai-Basin of Angola and Namibia. It incorporates meteorological and agricultural drought characteristics that impair the population’s ability to ensure food and water security. The BDI uses a copula function to combine common standardized drought indicators that describe precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture and vegetation conditions. Satellite remote sensing products were processed to analyze drought frequency, severity and duration. As the primary result, an integrated drought hazard map was built to spatially depict drought hot-spots. Temporally, the BDI correlates well with millet/sorghum yield (r = 0.51) and local water consumption (r = −0.45) and outperforms conventional indicators. In the light of a drought’s multifaceted impact on society, the BDI is a simple and transferable tool to identify areas highly threatened by drought in an integrated manner.

Sozial-ökologische Transformationen können nur gelingen, wenn wir sie als gemeinsame Gestaltungsaufgabe verstehen. Doch wie kann gemeinsames Handeln gefördert werden, wenn die Vorstellungen von einem ,,guten Leben“ so unterschiedlich sind? Die hier vorgestellten Gestaltungsprinzipien sollen transdisziplinärer Nachhaltigkeitsforschung Orientierung geben ‐ sie sollen helfen, Antworten auf komplexe Fragen wie die nach einer tragfähigen Wassernutzung oder dem Schutz der Artenvielfalt zu finden.

Nomadic pastoralism is of vital importance for grasslands worldwide. As one of the largest, widely intact, temperate grasslands in the world, the eastern Mongolian steppe looks back on a millennia-old tradition of nomadic pastoralism. Thus, this type of use of the ecosystem plays an important role in providing and maintaining ecosystem functions, e.g. seed dispersal, nutrient distribution and composition of plant communities. In addition, the nomadic way of life has important cultural and social functions. Global change processes like urbanisation, globalisation, digitalisation and climate change confront societies worldwide with the need for substantial sustainability transformations. While pastoralists are also strongly affected by these changes, their experiences and way of life, which have been evolving and adapting for millennia, can prove very helpful in addressing the transformation challenges. With this paper, we aim to reflect a new form of nomadic pastoralism for Mongolia in the twenty-first century. Implementing a transdisciplinary research process, we conducted a series of stakeholder workshops, surveys and co-writing periods, involving pastoralists, local and national authorities, economic and conservation actors, as well as scientific project partners from a wide range of disciplines. In doing so, we developed exploratory scenarios of contrasting plausible futures of the Mongolian steppe.

Mongolian nomadic herders traditionally pass on ecological knowledge intergenerationally, mainly within families. However, little is known about how current societal transformation processes may impact the application and transfer of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) amongst herders. Combining quantitative household survey data with qualitative interviews, we show that TEK is still widely applied amongst herders. Our data show that households living under conditions of greater societal transformation apply TEK more often in order to adapt to the situation than households under lower transformation pressure. High transformation pressure goes along with high human population and livestock density and thus competition for good pastureland. In addition, our results show that intragenerational knowledge transfer between families is gaining more importance nowadays. For Mongolia, we recommend facilitating access to and strengthening the exchange of TEK to prepare herders for the future due to the high level of uncertainty accompanying societal transformations.